The Left Isn’t Letting These Shootings Go to Waste

Many American liberals don’t seem to understand that failing to agree with them is not treason.

This becomes painfully evident when the left is in power.

The same people who just last year hailed dissent as “patriotic” when George W. Bush was in the White House now denounce passionate criticism of the Obama agenda as dangerous extremism. This is the same approach Hugo Chavez uses in Venezuela and Robert Mugabe uses in Zimbabwe.

We’ve been hearing this kind of slander for months from left-wing thinkers and media figures who seem to be running out of arguments in favor of President Obama’s radical restructuring of society.

Now, trying to use several recent shootings as proof, liberals are smearing as hate mongers those who oppose their big-government objectives.

Talking about conservative talk radio’s opposition to the President’s Big Government agenda, Bill Maher repeated President Clinton’s smear against conservative talkers, saying Timothy McVeigh was spurred to violence by this “same kind of talking.” He added, “Listening to people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck these days, I cannot figure out whether these right wingers are more dangerous when they’re in power or when they’re out of power, because when they’re out of power … their paranoia goes off the charts.”

In a blog post titled “This Is What the Class War Looks Like,” prominent Democratic strategist David Sirota, recently got in touch with his inner Marx.

“There is an incredible amount of hate out there right now — and the most intense of it is coming from those at the top who despise the idea that our society should do something — anything — to address rampant inequality,” said the former press secretary to House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D.-Wis.).

Since even before the Reichstag fire, tying your innocent opponents to horrific acts of violence has been an effective public relations tool.

Leftists are now using recent shootings committed by alleged right-wing extremists to advance their agenda. It’s all part of the left’s long-running effort to de-legitimize, stigmatize, and marginalize the views it doesn’t approve of.

Liberals point to the fatal shooting by an apparent neo-Nazi of a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Museum June 10 and the murder of late-term abortionist Dr. George Tiller in Kansas as proof that a vast right-wing terrorist conspiracy is afoot.

The left also tried to capitalize on the April 4 murder of three Pittsburgh police officers by a deranged shooter who muttered something about President Obama’s wanting to take away his guns. Reports indicate the man, who had recently lost his job, was agitated after getting into a fight with his mother, but left-of-center commentators tried to portray the man as a political activist.

Liberals say that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was wrong to cave into sustained criticism earlier this year by withdrawing a controversial politically motivated DHS report that labeled all conservatives, libertarians, and returning veterans as potential right-wing terrorists.

The report, which was a directive to law enforcement officials across the nation, essentially identified you as a potential terrorist.

That’s because if you are opposed to enlarging the redistributive state and spreading the wealth around, as the bulk of HUMAN EVENTS readers presumably are, then by definition you might be a terrorist. You might even be a crazed Nazi, according to the report, which incorporated some of the work of the paranoid conspiracy theorists of the radical left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center. No Actual Evidence

The report said that right-wing extremism in the U.S. could be “broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.”

Dovetails with ‘Fairness’ Doctrine Campaign

The report made no effort to distinguish between non-violent conservatives and libertarians and neo-Nazis and skinheads, lumping these disparate groups together. Anticlimactically, the report noted that there was no actual evidence “that domestic right-wing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence.” Nonetheless it raised the alarm that “the economic downturn and the election of the first African-American President” might help these “right-wing extremists” gain new recruits.

Conservatives have long protested this obvious attempt to shut down right-of-center criticism of the Obama agenda by lumping Ku Klux Klansmen and violent militias together with small-government types and members of the Federalist Society.

This thinly veiled attack on Red State America conveniently dovetails with the left’s campaign to censor talk radio through the imposition of the Fairness Doctrine by law or by so-called localism, which would allow ACORN and MoveOn.org activists to dictate the content of local broadcasting.

But the left can’t resist the temptation to try to score cheap political points. Here is just a small sample of what they’ve been saying:

Matthew Yglesias, a fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, said, “I hope that everyone who mau-maued the Department of Homeland Security for expressing concern about this kind of thing feels appropriately ashamed of themselves.”

Alex Pareene of Gawker.com complained that “right-wing domestic terror, weirdly, spikes when the right-wing media step up the intensity and violence of their rhetoric — which they happen to do when Democrats are in charge.”

Predictably, leftist author David Neiwert of the Crooks and Liars blog gloats, “Anyway, it’s not like we didn’t warn that this was going to happen.”

And just as Bill Clinton accused talk radio and conservatives in general of inciting the kind of violent hate that led Timothy McVeigh to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, leftist pontificator Paul Krugman of the New York Times is trying to incite hatred against right-of-center Americans today.

Krugman writes that “as in the early years of the Clinton Administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.” Fox News and Republicans “have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House.”

Krugman adds viciously that “at this point, whatever dividing line there was between mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd seems to have been virtually erased.”

Rich also implies that critics of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor are despicable racists. The “venomous personal attacks” on the judge have little to do with her “wise Latina” comments, judicial track record, or membership in the radical group La Raza, and instead are tied together by “an aggrieved note of white victimization only a shade less explicit than that in [Holocaust Museum shooter James] von Brunn’s white supremacist screeds.”

You’ll remember it was the race-obsessed Rich who in 2004 couldn’t help attacking President Reagan while he lay in state at the Capitol Rotunda. “Although mourners paying their respects to Reagan were often touted as representative of the entire nation, you could nod off counting the white visitors before a black person appeared.” Rich also insisted that the massive outpouring of grief regarding Reagan was phony and that media coverage of the death bore a strong resemblance to the saturation coverage of O.J. Simpson’s murder trial.

Knee-jerk liberal Charles M. Blow said in the April 3 New York Times that conservative media figures use “veiled hate speech” to rally their supporters against Obama’s progressive juggernaut.

“Some simply lace their unscrupulous screeds with loaded language about the fall of the Republic. We have to ‘rise up’ and ‘take back our country,’” he wrote.

Wasn’t Michael Moore using the same language not too long ago to protest the Bush administration?